Qatar is reinforcing its long-term water security through advanced desalination infrastructure, with the Facility E reverse osmosis desalination plant emerging as a key project supporting the nation’s sustainability and development ambitions.
Florentina Canto Navarro, electrical manager for the Facility E reverse osmosis desalination plant project and senior industrial electrical engineer at Acciona, said large-scale desalination facilities remain essential for Qatar due to the country’s limited natural freshwater resources.
“Large-scale desalination projects such as the Facility E reverse osmosis plant are crucial for Qatar’s long-term water availability,” Navarro said. “Currently, desalination plants provide the country’s potable water supply, which makes such facilities strategic for the country’s development.”
According to Navarro, Facility E represents the next generation of desalination infrastructure, designed to combine large-scale production capacity with advanced operational technologies that operate efficiently under the challenging environmental conditions of the Gulf region.
“Facility E represents the next generation of desalination plants composing Qatar’s infrastructure,” she said. “It combines optimal production performance with advanced control and monitoring systems that can operate at full load under GCC conditions.”
The project also reflects a broader technological shift in Qatar’s water sector, where reverse osmosis (RO) technology is increasingly replacing traditional thermal desalination due to greater efficiency and lower environmental impact.
“From my experience working in Qatar for the last 10 years, there has been a shift from traditional thermal desalination projects to reverse osmosis plants due to their major efficiency and environmental sustainability,” Navarro noted.
Reverse osmosis technology significantly reduces energy consumption compared with conventional desalination systems, helping lower carbon emissions while maintaining high water production capacity.
“Reverse osmosis plants reduce power consumption a lot compared with traditional desalination methods,” Navarro said. “They also produce significantly fewer CO₂ emissions, making them both the most economical and the most sustainable solution.”
Modern digital monitoring and automation systems are also being integrated into the Facility E project to enhance operational efficiency and reliability.
“These technologies allow operators to control energy use, chemical dosing and membrane performance in real time,” Navarro explained. “This helps optimise plant operation, extend equipment lifespan and improve sustainability.”
Navarro also highlighted the broader transformation of Qatar’s infrastructure landscape over the past decade. Having worked on projects in Qatar throughout her career at Acciona, she said the country has evolved from a phase of rapid urban development to a more strategic, sustainability-driven approach to infrastructure planning.
“In previous years, many projects focused primarily on urban growth,” she said. “Today, the approach is more aligned with strategic planning and sustainability.”
She also pointed to Qatar’s multicultural engineering environment as one of the country’s key strengths in delivering large-scale infrastructure projects.
“One remarkable aspect of working in Qatar is the collaboration between many nationalities, international engineering companies and local institutions,” she said. “This creates a highly skilled ecosystem capable of delivering complex projects efficiently.”
For Navarro, working on projects such as Facility E is both technically challenging and personally rewarding.
“What I enjoy most is seeing how ideas, designs and calculations gradually take shape and become reality,” she said. “After some time, you see all parts of the project assembled and finally producing water from scratch, knowing you were part of that process.”
